more things that'll kill you

I'd tell you what I learned today, but I can't think of it right now, so here's what actually stuck from recent events.

A week ago I went to a meeting of the local sick people group, and we had a speaker on how the FCC and smartmeters are trying to kill us.

• The FCC: maintaining the switched network phone system is getting burdensome for phone companies, so they want the FCC to stop making them maintain it. Conventional wisdom is that all of us can just use cell phones or VOIP, which ignores the fact that people with EHS (that's electromagnetic hypersensitivity) have a terrible time with cell phones (that's obvious -- normies worry about those) and computers. Computers come with things like power supplies and fans, which are just electrically noisy or create magnetic fields. Plus, you haven't seen a tri-field meter max out until you've put it near a computer monitor. The EHS community is pulling out all the stops for this. They have enough trouble without having to give up phones and switch back to US mail, which, when you need to ask a store a question, is just not going to cut it these days.
  
  The problem arises when they rope in other people. Apparently you get more protesters if you use some fear tactics, like explaining that people can listen in on your cell phone conversations, which hasn't been true for something like ten years. The most annoying argument they're using is that people with Alzheimer's will not be able to figure out how to make a phone call over the computer. I want to say, "You know how I know you don't know anything about VOIP?" but they don't. They can't use computers without frying themselves.
  
  I really wish people would wise up and recognize EHS in its own right, so then they wouldn't have to say stupid stuff to get attention. (Also, it's electrical noise, not 'dirty electricity,' but whatever, said the nerd. And the nerd just said EHS is real because it is, and I'm a physicist, so I learned critical thinking, thank you.)
  
  
• On smartmeters: Apparently the EHS community is not worried about power companies transmitting information over power lines. You can get plug-in filters that take the noise off your household wires, and then you're all set. This solution will still not make ARRL happy, since their antennas are outside.

In other news, bisphenol A will still kill you, but at least it comes out of your system pretty fast when you stop ingesting it.

what is wrong with the air now?

For the record, this is what's going on in air quality around here according to the EPA:

...Several questions from around Arizona have come in concerning the unusual haziness across the Phoenix forecast area. There haven't been any major winds in the past several days and it's been less than a week since our last "major" rain. So what's going on? A deeper look into the situation uncovers a possible phenomenon that occurs every now and then known as an Asian Dust event. Every so often a large dust storm rolls off the coast of China, most often originating in the Mongolian Desert. This dust cloud is transported across the Pacific Ocean and sweeps through the western U.S. This particular event made landfall Thursday in Baja, Mexico and southern California (http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/FIRE/DATA/SMOKE/2011D150314.html). Friday's report has this haze spreading as far east as New Mexico and western Texas.... According [to] the current monitored air quality levels, there are no health concerns at the surface associated to this upper-level dust event....

So EIs definitely feel this kind of event, and husband wondered yesterday if normies felt it, too, but didn't know any better. He had some errands to run and observed that people in general seemed kind of cranky and preoccupied.

snake accidents, post-breast-cancer fatigue, and death in a bag of sugar

Today I learned that if you watch a 4' snake crawl along the top of a cinderblock wall, wobbling a little, the snake could screw up and fall off. It makes a louder-than-expected thump when it hits the ground, even accounting for it landing on an aloe plant. (The snake was fine -- it didn't even look embarrassed while I laughed my ass off as it slithered away.)

In other news, about a third of breast cancer survivors have lasting fatigue such that their norepinephrine (a stress hormone) levels rise more than expected when given a somewhat stressful task. Initially the fatigue comes from chemotherapy, but the lasting fatigue appears to come from the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems being out of balance. The sympathetic nervous system, the thing in charge of stress hormones and your fight-or-flight reflex, is an energy hog, and it makes people tired. The researchers mentioned they had another study going looking into whether yoga could help straighten these people out.

As someone who had to gain voluntary control over my fight-or-flight reflex, I can tell them now that yoga won't fix it. Lying on the floor doing relaxation exercises won't fix it. Exercise, something they're looking into, helps, but won't fix it either, particularly if you're fatigued enough that you can't do things like ride your bike for four hours at a time.

I was telling an EI about my experience with fight-or-flight the other day, and he said it must have been hard to be fearful all the time. I wasn't. I was depressed and sometimes anxious, and didn't process information or chemicals quickly.

Exposure to chemicals, even voluntary ones like chemotherapy, ramps up your fight-or-flight reflex gradually (if it does at all). You don't see it coming. If you constantly tried to fight or run, people might figure out that there was a problem with your fight-or-flight reflex. They don't. It's not obvious, and yoga isn't going to uncondition somebody's sympathetic nervous system unless there's something going on there that I haven't heard about.

Also, sugar and high fructose corn syrup will kill you. Sucrose is half glucose, which your whole body processes, and half fructose, which your liver handles. If you get too much fructose at once, your liver turns it straight into fat, which leads to a fatty liver, a key part of metabolic syndrome, which will totally kill you because then you'll get type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The trick is figuring out how much is too much, and no one wants to put a number on it. The best number I came up with was the amount of sugar the FDA thought typical Americans ate in 1986, back when we, as a nation, were not so wide. They said 40 lbs/year/person, which is 200 calories of added sugar per day. The USDA, considered much more reliable, said 75 lbs/year/person.

So I was going to figure that 200 calories of sugar per day is a reasonable upper limit -- that's like a quarter of a batch of cookies, which, after my initial 'I can eat cookies again' phase, is not something that will ever again occur here on a daily basis -- but then, toward the end of the article, it starts talking about cancer. Trying to handle all that insulin makes your cells go nuts and sometimes turn cancerous. Cancer started rising way before 1986, so we're unsafe at any speed.

things you can't do even if you're feeling much better

Yesterday I learned that doing homeless EIs' laundry is a good way to contaminate your dryer and not just one, but both washers.

Here's how you do it: you wash a bunch of new t-shirts in your auxiliary washer for one of the homeless ladies, mostly following her directions. Then she comes over and sniffs (and touches) the shirts, each one, probably more than once, and also touches the giant glass jars they were in. She still reacts to the shirts, and you're reacting to her at this point, so you say you'll keep washing them until they're ok.

So you go inside, and since you washed the jars just an hour ago, you put them over near the washer and dryer, and without examining the situation, you put your own stuff from the good washer into the dryer.

At this point, you suck whatever the heck is coming out of the homeless lady and getting onto everything she touches into your dryer, contaminating it and your clothes. Plus you put her stuff back into the auxiliary washer, liberally coating the inside of that with whatever it is. When you take your stuff out of the dryer, you get a surprise, so you try to wash it out in the good washer, which just doesn't work on this stuff. Ta da!

So now both washers and the dryer have been scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, which probably only took about six hours this time, and I learned my lesson.